Unleash Your Creative Influence: Insights from Jay Clouse

Hello, my friends, and welcome to another exciting episode of Negotiate Anything. This show is produced by the American Negotiation Institute, and with over 5 million downloads and listeners in over 180 countries, listeners just like you have made this the number one negotiation podcast in the world. Hi, my name is Kwame Christian, and I am the founder and CEO of the American Negotiation Institute here at A&I. We believe that the best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations. And we are passionate about providing you with the best content that will help you to make your difficult conversations easier, both at work and at home. Lastly, I want to remind you that we offer consulting and conduct trainings, both virtually and in person all around the world. Our focus is in three main areas. First, negotiation and conflict resolution. Second, leadership. And lastly, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Check the link in the description below to learn more about how we could work with you and your team. And now, without further ado, let's jump into the interview.

Jay, thanks for joining us today, my friend.

Hello. Good to see you, Kwame. So hard to sit down and record a podcast and not just immediately dive into all the things of being a creator off the bat, but excited to be here.

Yes, we're excited to have you. So how can you get us started? By telling us about yourself and what you do.

Yeah, I'm a creator and you could say I'm a podcaster, you could say I'm a writer, you could say I'm a course creator. I'm all of those things. But my content is a little meta because I am studying the best creators in the world in trying to synthesize and contextualize what they do well, what's working for them today, that other up and coming creators can apply to their own businesses. And I do that on a variety of platforms, but that's it in a nutshell.

That's awesome. Okay, and listeners, you're seeing a pattern here. A lot of my friends are very humble, so I have to throw them some alley oops. So, Jay, can you please tell them about your community, your podcast, LinkedIn, learning.

All those cool things?

Okay, okay, sure, sure. Let me. Let me remove the humble hat. So the podcast is called Creative Elements. It's got over a million downloads. I've been talked to some incredible creators, including you, James Clear, Tim Urban, Cody Sanchez, Tory Dunlap. The newsletter has been in flight since 2017 and that has 14,000 subscribers or so. Launched a membership community this year for people who are trying to become professional creators. And we have a hundred members in there and it's all been really, really good. Just launched our YouTube channel for the podcast this week. Seven courses for LinkedIn learning, as you shared, and I think five or so courses independently. So I've, I've made a lot of stuff.

Kwame, dare I say, you've created a lot of things. This is really great. And, you know, I think this, this does a good job of laying the foundation of really what it means to be a creator. Because, yes, you are an entrepreneur, but it's a specific type of entrepreneurship that you are engaged in. And so when you think about how you would define a creator, what would that definition look like to you?

Generally, the term these days is used to define somebody whose product is mostly digital in nature, probably tied to information and knowledge transfer, another way of saying, like courses or workshops or even books and things like that, or blogs. So creator uses digital mediums to create digital products. And what they create, in my opinion, is for the benefit of both the consumer and the creator. Both of them benefit and capture value from that exchange so that the creator can continue to financially afford to create and the consumer gets closer to whatever goal they're trying to get towards.

Love it. Awesome definition, awesome definition. So, listeners, on this episode, Jay is going to talk about some of the persuasive endeavors he has as a creator and an entrepreneur. And so we're going to talk about some of the difficult conversations he has to have, some of the cool negotiations with different brands and sponsors he has, how he persuades people to follow him and trust him as, as he builds his ever growing tribe. And then hopefully we still have time. And this is something I want to explore because I know I've had these before, difficult conversations with your significant other around the business, because those are always fascinating, but they're all, they're critical. They are critical and often overlooked. So I'm really excited to get some of the. The gems of wisdom you have that you've gleaned on this journey. So let's start with the basics, because if you're a creator and nobody consumes what you create, then are you really a creator? It's like if a tree falls in the woods, right?

Yeah.

And so we have to talk about that.

And that's kind of why I preface with the definition of both sides of the equation are capturing value because there is artistry, something that you create and isn't necessarily generating a financial return for you. And probably you aren't trying to create a financial return if you're approaching it as a pure artist. But yeah, the Creators that I talk to, they understand that this is a transaction in a way. It's a transfer of information, it's a transfer of trust. In order to build a relationship and eventually lead to whatever your pathway of monetizing that attention is, you have to find a way to align incentives with your audience so that the way that you monetize attention is serving them so that you can be served, essentially.

I love that. And let's focus on this. You want to align incentives to monetize attention. And I love this because we're in an attention economy and it's really exciting for people who aspire to be creators, because there's more opportunity now than ever before in this space. And at the same time, there's more competition now than ever before. And so there are going to be times, not only as creators, but just as individuals, when we're trying to stand out, when we're trying to get positive attention and demonstrate that we are people of value and we have something to bring to the table. And so when you think about how you're able to persuade an audience and build trust with an audience, what does that process look like for you?

It looks like communicating with that audience on a one to one level, many, many times over, you know, and doing that for a period of time. When you are a creator, you are building one to one relationships with people who are consuming your content. I don't love the word consume, but we don't have it. Great. We don't have a better word, so we're going to use that to understand the same concepts here. But you're building a one to one relationship. When somebody receives an email from you, they aren't receiving that email alongside a bunch of other people in their inbox. It's a very personal thing. You're in their inbox or you're in their feed. They are receiving that message from you directly, one to one. And the relationship you create, create by doing that is what eventually allows you to build a career and a profession out of being a creator. You have to come through in those one to one moments and deliver value and create trust and make that person interested in continuing to hear from you. Because it's very easy to stop hearing from anybody that we don't want to hear from. Whether you block them, you mute them, you report their emails as spam, whatever you want to do, people have control over the messages they receive. Um, and you want to be one of those chosen messages. And that comes from a one to one connection. And creators are doing that at Scale.

This is. This is really great. And I think a lot of people might find this shocking, right, Because. Because of what you said at the end, at scale. Right. So from. From the outside looking in, it looks like the creator is talking to a massive audience, and they are. But I think what you've done very skillfully is demonstrated one of your differentiators, why you were one of the few that was able to break through the noise. And it's because you don't think about it as though you're talking to the masses. Even though you are. You think about it as though you're talking one to one. So how do you do that?

You know, this is hard advice to give because until you've gotten a bunch of practice, it doesn't really make sense. But it actually comes from trying less, I think, because it's an unnatural thing to create some message, some digital artifact that you know is going to be consumed by multiple people and do that in a way that feels personal. But the way you do it is just by imagining that you're talking to a friend or writing to a friend or recording something for a friend, because we feel that. We feel that connection that comes through. Um, we were talking before we got on this. He said, this is a nice camera. Is this a dslr? I am currently staring into a massive lens. That is so weird. But I have to imagine that I'm talking to Kwame. You know, like, I can't imagine talking to a camera. I have to. This, again, comes through practice. Know that I'm talking to Kwame, and I'm talking to the person on the other side of this. And when I was doing courses for LinkedIn learning, you've done several yourself. You know, one of the most impactful directions I got from the team when writing my scripts, they say, hey, in your intro, your friend Jay. In the middle of this, your teacher Jay. But your intro, the hook, your friend Jay. How would you write this if you were sitting at a coffee table across from somebody else, just a friend who asked you this question. How would you lead into this conversation? That really helped me unlock how to write in my voice. And the other thing is, I gotta say, doing a podcast is kind of a hack for this, but you don't have to do a podcast to have this benefit. When you write something, if you take the time to read it out loud, it becomes very clear quickly if that sounds like you. If you would use those words in conversation. There's this. This. We often will go to, like, flowery language when we start Writing something to, you know, the abyss or like the masses. We default to like, well, what do we learn in English class? And we think bigger words are good, long sentences. Like we get this flowery literature like language. And really when we communicate day to day, we communicate it like a fifth grade level. And when you're a creator and you're trying to relate to people one to one at scale, you need to be communicating at like a fifth grade level. It's not to say you talk to them like they are fifth graders. It's to say short words, easy to understand words that are in most people, most people's vocabulary, that's good. Short sentences, that's good. Transitional words like and, but, or those are good. And that's not what we were taught in higher ed. But those types of things you learn with practice and makes it seem like you're a more approachable one to one person in their lives.

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Right back after this. This is great. And I love kind of taking a bit of a psychological, I should say a philosophical bend to this because you started off with an interesting approach which is try less right. And that's. It reminds me of Taoism when you think about away, like doing less right, the being in flow. And when you're having a great conversation with somebody, time just goes past. You're just flowing, you're just in the moment completely with the person. And really it sounds like that's what you're trying to do with your messaging. But that's really hard to do for a number of reasons. And one of the, one of them was, hey, listen, we learned how to write in school as if we went to college. They told us bigger words are better, things like that. And I think honestly, of course, I am very appreciative of my legal career and the degrees I have and everything, but when I was Starting off as a creator, one of the biggest challenges was unlearning how to communicate like a lawyer. Right. If you listen to my earlier episodes, there's a lot of big words, random Latin thrown in. Thrown in. Why am I speaking Latin? Because that's how lawyers talk. Right. And so simplifying, simplifying the language to make it more approachable has been really helpful. But it takes a lot of humility because go even beyond the skill set of communicating one to one at scale, to even be willing to do what it takes to create a one on one relationship that has trust at scale takes a lot of humility. So for you, how did you get the mindset that you needed in order to be willing to do what it took to communicate this way?

Well, in the beginning, I wasn't trying to be a creator because I didn't even know what that really was. What I was trying to do was get over this narrative that I had, which was that I was not a creative person. I had this time in 2017, January of 2017 to be exact, when I was feeling very stuck and blocked. And in the book the Artist's Way by Julie Cameron, she talks about this concept of a shadow artist. Everyone has a shadow artist, and it's this part of you that if you allowed it, just wants to play and make things. And your shadow artists may be following around like painters and things. I was starting to follow creators and writers in my mind. And you can, if you're listening to this and you're kind of like understanding this itch that you feel, this like discontentment with the way you're spending your time and feeling like you're not doing things fun and creative and you want to be. That's your shadow artist talking to you, I think. And you can kind of uncover the flavor of your shadow artist by looking at your social media feeds. You've already chosen to follow certain people who are on those feeds, and they are creators and you're following them for a reason. Whether it's I like their personality, I like their vibe, I like that they're pursuing this lifestyle. You know, some of my friends, they follow exclusively people who are doing tiny homes. Some of my friends are following me exclusively people who are building YouTube channels. It's different types of desires and things they want to do. But we often cling to people that are doing the things that we have an innate, maybe even unspoken, ununderstood desire to do. And I was in that phase and I wasn't trying to be a creator. I was just Trying to stop feeling that nagging itch that was making me uncomfortable because I wasn't exploring something. And my means of doing that was to begin writing every day. Because I told myself writing is a creative act. If I can prove to myself that I can write something every day, that's proving to myself that I am creative and I can be creative. And that's just how it started. And I only wrote publicly as a form of accountability. And then the people that were following along kind of demanded more of my writing, so I kept doing it. And then more people started subscribing, and then I started to get more intentional about it because I saw the business model, frankly, and the opportunity of what being a digital content creator could be.

This is a great opportunity for us to transition too, because we're seeing your origin story where you had this creative nature inside of you. You wanted to find an outlet for it, and then you started doing it publicly, and then you started to find your audience in that way. And so now you've gotten to that point where you're starting to build that following. And now we are going to enter a phase where a lot of creators struggle, and that's transitioning into monetization strategy. And so now I am. You know, we already have a lunch date on the books to talk business nerd stuff, right? So business strategy, that's. That's something typically outside the bounds of this podcast. But let's just hypothetically, let's assume some of the most difficult things. Let's assume you have a product that is valuable, okay. And let's assume that you have a solid business strategy behind you, okay? You still have to make that transition where people trust you enough to part with their hard earned money. And so as you were making that transition, how did you communicate that value so they felt comfortable paying you what you were worth for the value you can provide?

Well, look, there are a couple ways that you can build a business in this world. There's audience first and then sell something to them after you've kind of collected people who are excited to hear from you. Or there's create a product and then go try to collect a group of people who would be a good fit for that product. A lot of people do that ladder path, and that's a lot harder because you're already starting all of those relationships with an agenda, frankly, because you're like, I have this product, and frankly, I'm trying to get in front of you because I want to sell it. A lot of creators that I know, myself included, we started creating because we like to create. And then the thing that we sold came later as a function of, well, what are the people that are following along? What do they need? What do they want? And so it's a lot easier in that world because you've already spent some time building up trust and goodwill, frankly, with these people. And you know, if you did your due diligence, the thing that you made or are making is something they're going to want because you probably sourced that idea and that problem from the people you're already writing to. So that's an alignment of incentives where it's like, you don't have to push something on somebody who wants it. The example is like somebody in the desert, how much would they pay for a bottle of water? Let's also assume that the person in the desert has money and they're like, hey, I would happily pay some amount of money for this bottle of water because my need is so high and I trust that this is going to solve that need. Me giving away some of the cash in my wallet is a worthwhile trade. In fact, that's why I made it to begin with. If you have that type of dynamic with your audience, that's really good. There's a lot of horror stories or bad blood with the idea of sales. Because I think when we're kids, we're only introduced to the idea of sales and the experience of sales when it's so remarkably bad that we have to talk about it. But we're constantly buying things. People are constantly selling things to us and we don't say, man, I am so glad that McDonald's sold me that hamburger today. Yeah, that was a good sale. We don't talk about the things, whatever it is that we bought that we were happy to buy, that we were satisfied with our purchase and would do. Again, we don't think of that as sales. We just think of that as part of our day to day existence. And the reason that we have money and make money to begin with, because we have things that we want and that gets us those things that we want. You want to be the salesman that is selling things that don't even feel like you're selling things. It's just the obvious clear next step or the, the thing that people want and they're, they're happy to trade money for. It doesn't feel like they're being sold to.

Yeah, and this is good because you, you brought up something that's really important, which is the reluctance to make the request. And so this is something that we see all the time in. In our work, too. So you put yourself in a good position, and then essentially you kind of flirt with the idea of working together and hope that they say, jay, I choose you. Right? And so at some point, you have to make the request. You have to be comfortable enough making that request. And I know in your incredibly robust membership platform that you've created, I'm sure there are people who have struggled with that, making the request. And so for those people out there who are struggling with asking for what they want, what advice do you have for them?

Man, this is. This is such a good topic of conversation. There's so much we could explore here. You know, we have, like, infinite choice for just about anything that we want. And I think for the average person, that makes us afraid to pull the trigger on making a decision at all, because we're afraid we're going to make the wrong decision. So we often will just postpone making any decision until there is, like, a hard driver forcing us to make a decision almost, or like some sort of inflection point that's really inviting us to yes or no, you know, because we will postpone almost indefinitely if given the opportunity. So if you don't make the ask, people aren't going to make any move at all. Like, they need. They need some sort of deadline. They need some sort of forcing function to make a decision. And when we're making decisions, we want to be confident that were making the right decisions. Before I was a creator, I was a freelancer, and I still do some consulting from time to time. And what I learned was people were much more likely to say yes and work with me if I was confident that I was going to be able to deliver for them. They were looking to me to lead the conversation. And if I was leading the conversation, and I was making it very clear that I understood their problem and I could get them to the solution that they wanted, I can confidently say that that put their mind at ease. It made it feel like, yeah, I'm making a good decision here, but a lot of people will put the ball in the court of the decision maker, and they're just going to take that ball and run circles around the court and trying to avoid you. They just don't want to make a decision, so you have to make the ask to force things. And the last thing I'll say is, when you walk into a Starbucks coffee, you're also asked to make a decision, but they have on their board. Here's what's available here's the price for it. I don't know why we don't think about that more as service providers and if not the actual presentation of that, the experience of that, because the more that somebody says, hey, this is what I want, and you can repeat back and say it sounds like you want this, is that true? And they say yes. And you say, here's the price. And you say that just matter of factly. This is business, this is not personal. You want this, I can provide it. Here's the price for that. It feels less like there's less panic to say, are they trying to screw me over? Am I getting the best deal possible? Do I have to negotiate out of this? When you know your value and you know the price for this thing, and especially once you start getting some precedent of other people paying that price, the more you remove any personal feelings from it and just say this is what the price is, the more quickly in my experience, people say yes or no. And it's usually yes. And if it's no, it's a quick no. And even the no's are usually like the start of something like, ah, can you. And sometimes my answer is yes, I can, or here's how we can. And sometimes the answer is no. Take it or leave it.

Yeah. Oh, this is good. And so one of the things that you mentioned that I really want to dig into that again, often overlooked, but very, very, it sometimes could be the deciding factor is how you make the request. And so you could say here's the price very matter of factly like you described, or you could say, well, I know it's a little bit expensive, but here's okay, cool. So they're going to say no. How you make that ask is really important. Can you go a bit deeper into that?

Yeah, it is really important because again, they're looking for confidence. Like if you feel and are exuding confidence and calmness that you can deliver for them, then they're going to feel that and they're more likely to say yes. If they don't feel that, they're way more likely to say no. Now the other thing that I've worked on with a lot of people that's very helpful if someone's coming to you with a need, they probably also have a timeline. And if it's not like completely clearly stated, they have a good idea of it. And the trouble that a lot of freelancers have is they will send a proposal, just never hear from that person again. And it's uncomfortable to follow up. But you have to do it. But it's easy when you follow up to feel like, all right, now I am the jerk just bugging this person. And a lot of freelancers, who are often creatives, who are often empaths, struggle with that. So the important thing that I tell them is when you're talking to this person and you're getting a sense of their needs and what they're trying to achieve and why they might buy something from you or hire you, you need to understand their timeline. You need to say, okay, sounds like you want this. When do you want that to be done or delivered to you? Get some sort of tangible date so that when they say that, you can say, okay, I can totally deliver that for you. Here's when we need to get started so that I can make sure we stick to that timeline. And now when you follow up, all of your follow up can be in the interests of that person to say, hey, haven't heard from you. You mentioned that you wanted to have this done by date. We can still do that, but I need to get started by this earlier date. So let me know if you would like to move forward, because I need to know by this date for us to hit your original timeline. It's not pestering, it's saying, I heard you. I know what I can deliver and I can know. I know I can deliver it on your timeline. But for that to be true, balls in your court, and you need to make a decision. And that's the way that I think you can really make the ask and get a response.

Yeah, I love this. And Jay, one of the things that you mentioned was your confidence and the fact that people can sense that. And really what I'm realizing is that it could be helpful to think about it in this way. Yes, we're going to be selling our products or services or just day to day. We're going to be selling our ideas, trying to get buy in. But we're not just selling products or services or ideas. We're also selling confidence. So we're selling the confidence they have in ourselves. So if I'm making a request, they need to see me as a confident person. So for instance, if I'm trying to get a negotiation training from the American Negotiation Institute, and Kwame doesn't seem to be very confident in his negotiation skills or his curriculum, I'm not going to sell very many, Jay. That's not going to be very successful. But then, you know, you, you have to be able to deliver with confidence but not cross the line into arrogance and in your opinion, what is that distinction between confidence and arrogance?

You don't want to make the client feel like a dummy. And when you're arrogant, you're putting on this air of like, contempt, which is to say, I am here and you are slightly below me here. And I can't believe that you don't see this. This is so obvious. When you create this invisible hierarchy with whoever the person is that you're talking to that is going from confident to arrogant, you've removed this level playing field here. We can collaborate and partner together on this and try to turn it into this better than you, you need me type of thing, which people are going to naturally both dislike and probably rebel against.

Yep, well said. And when you think about the concept of reciprocity, I give you something, you give me something in return, you feel a little bit of psychological debt to repay that whatever it happens to be right. The opposite, in my opinion of reciprocity is vengeance, right? Oh, you gave me something bad, I'm going to give you something bad in return. And really, when we put ourselves in a position where we're coming off as arrogant, we're putting ourselves as higher than other people, then we get that negative reciprocity called revenge. Oh, you think you're better than me now in this interaction, in order to wreak claim my self respect, I'm going to take it from you and show that we are equals, or in fact, I'm better than you. And now we have what could be described as an ego measuring competition where, where the, where the conversation spirals out of control. So I think it's really important to understand that distinction. And very importantly, we have to be humble enough to receive that feedback from other people because we might be coming off as arrogant and not realizing that. So being humble enough to receive that and make adjustments is really important too.

I'll also say in any of these conversations, I try to say as little as required because it's not about me, it's about this person. You know what they want. They want to take their money as an input, put it in your pocket, and have the outcome magically appear. Now that won't happen exactly like magic, but it should feel as close to magic as possible. And you're going to have no problem getting clients because they don't want to pay you a bunch of money and then also have to do a bunch of work and have all this communication and all this back and forth. That's unpleasant. They're probably going to communicate with you throughout this entire transaction. So if you're coming across as arrogant, that sounds like a horrible time they don't want to do. That doesn't sound magic at all. If you are very pleasant and you're making this about them and what they're trying to achieve, and for them, the input is, here's some money, here's the straightest line we can do the minimum inputs that I need from you to get this done in the fastest amount of time and achieve the result that you want. That's the type of transaction people want to enter into and are excited to enter into.

I love this. I love this. Jay, there is so much for us to talk about, and I think this just means we have to have you back on, my friend. So. What a pleasure. Pleasant accident there, too. So we have a lot more to talk about. But before you go, remind the listeners again about your podcast, your courses, and how they can get in touch.

Yeah, if you're a podcast listener, which obviously you are, check out Creative Elements here in your player. I talk to incredible people. Go all the way back to episode number 23 and listen to Kwame, who was amazing, and you can find me online by searching my name. I'm hard to avoid. Twitter is where I'm most active. That's just a class.

Awesome, Jay. Really appreciate it. Thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me, man.

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Will see you in the next episode. I'll catch you later.